The rebels told me to join them, but I said no. Then they killed my smaller brother. I changed my mind.
—L., age seven1
One of the original sins of humanity has been its inability to live at peace. From the very beginning of history, conflicts over food, territory, riches, power, and prestige have been an almost constant recurrence. Indeed, much of what is written in human history is simply a history of warfare. The world that we know today, from the states that we live in to the technology that we use daily, has been greatly shaped by violent struggle.2
Yet even in this most terrible realm of societal violence, rules of behavior developed. Among the very first was the differentiation between warriors and civilians. In even the most primitive societies, a distinction was made between those who chose to bear the risks involved in the profession of fighting and those who lay outside the field of battle. In a sense, a bargain was struck. Honor and power were accorded to the warriors. In exchange, civilians were granted a sort of guarantee of protection from their depredations. While it applied to all those who were unarmed, special immunity was usually given to certain groups: the old, the infirm, women, and, most particularly, children.3
While certainly not always complied with, this “law of the innocents” had been one of the most enduring rules of war, arguably the most important of what legal theorists term jus in bello (laws in war). The deliberate targeting of civilians, in particular children, has been the single greatest taboo of all, extending from ancient Chinese philosophy and traditional African tribal societies to the state signatories of the modern-day Geneva Conventions.
Unfortunately, in the chaos and callousness of modern-day warfare, this law has seemingly broken down. Where rules and limits once governed the practice of war, these standards no longer hold in much of warfare at the turn of the twenty-first century. Michael Ignatieff, an ethicist at Harvard University, sums up the changes as simply being a massive breakdown in what he terms the “Warrior’s Honor.”4 The participants in battle are often no longer honored warriors, guided by an ethical code, but rather new predators, who target the weakest of society. The result of this breakdown has been a disturbing change in the morbidity of contemporary conflicts.
If you join the paramilitaries [the AUC in Colombia], your first duty is to kill. They tell you, “Here you are going to kill.” From the very beginning, they teach you how to kill. I mean when you arrive at the camp, the first thing they do is kill a guy, and if you are a recruit they call you over to prick at him, to chop off his hands and arms.
—A., age twelve5
The ancient distinction between combatants and civilians as targets of violence has arguably disappeared, or, even worse, swung the other way, creating a new pattern of warfare. Civilians have always suffered in war, but the difference is that in many present-day conflicts they are the primary target. Tactics of ethnic cleansing and genocide have replaced the strict codes of conduct and chivalry that guided such military social orders as medieval European feudalism and ancient Japanese Bushido. Whereas wars were once fought almost exclusively between soldiers, in recent decades the worldwide percentage of victims from wars has become predominantly civilian. In World War I, the percentage of casualties that were civilian was under 10 percent of the total; in World War II, the percentage had risen to nearly 50 percent. The evolution continued through the next fifty years, to the point that now the overwhelming majority of those killed in conflicts are civilians instead of soldiers. For example, of all the persons killed in African conflicts in the late twentieth century, the overwhelming preponderance (92 percent) were civilians. Similar figures hold true for the wars in the Balkans.6 Civilians once had no place on the battlefield; now the battlefield is almost incomplete without them.
Michael Klare, a professor at Hampshire College who studies modern warfare, describes this change:
The widespread slaughter of civilians in recent conflicts forces us to rethink what we mean by the concept of war. In the past, “war” meant a series of armed encounters between the armed forces of established states, usually for the purpose of territorial conquest or some other clearly defined strategic objective. But the conflicts of the current era bear little resemblance to this model: most take place within the borders of a single state and entail attacks by paramilitary and irregular forces on unarmed civilians for the purpose of pillage, rape, or ethnic slaughter—or some combination of all three.7
Because the most basic laws of war have increasingly been abandoned, conflicts have been characterized by horrific levels of violence. In particular, the once unimaginable targeting of children has become a widespread tactic of war. Examples run from the Serb snipers during the Sarajevo siege who deliberately shot at children walking between their parents, to Rwandan radio broadcasts before the 1994 genocide that reminded genocidal Hutu killers to be sure not to forget “the little ones.” The resulting tolls from this shift in attitudes are staggering. In the last decade of warfare, more than two million children have been killed, a rate of more than five hundred a day, or one every three minutes, for a full ten years.
For those children who are touched by war but still survive, the experiences are nonetheless devastating. Six million more children have been disabled or seriously injured in wars over the last decade, and one million children have been orphaned. Almost twenty-five million more children have been driven from their homes by conflict, roughly 50 percent of the current total number of refugees in the world. Another ten million children have been psychologically traumatized by war.8 As you read this book, these numbers are growing only larger.
As the most basic laws of war have been increasingly violated, there is a new, perhaps even more disturbing element. Not only have children become the new targets of violence and atrocities in war, but many now have also become the perpetrators.
As the twenty-first century opens, a new practice in warfare has emerged. Indeed, it is becoming so common that it can be thought of as an entirely new doctrine of warfare (“doctrines” are what militaries think of as a set of guidelines about the use of force). While not formalized in a drill manual, it represents a new body of fundamental principles, deliberate instrumental choices, and transferred teachings about how to fight.9 This new doctrine, though, is the dark underbelly of the display of high technology and clean, distant precision used by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, commonly referred to as the Revolution in Military Affairs, or RMA. Instead, it encapsulates modern warfare in its rawest and most troubling form. This new doctrine prescribes the methods and circumstances of children’s employment in battle.
The use of child soldiers is far more widespread than the scant attention it typically receives. In over three fourths of the armed conflicts around the world, there are now significant numbers of children participating as active combatants. These are not just youths who are on the cusp of adulthood, but also include minors as young as six years old.
We were frightened because we were young children and we didn’t know anything about the army. Even on the shooting range, when they tell you to fire, you’re always very scared. For me to overcome that fear, I had to kill someone at the training camp. They brought someone to me one night when I was on duty guarding an entrance. It was a child, whose face they’d covered, and they told me he was a rebel, an enemy, and I had to kill him. That’s exactly what I did. On the spot. With my knife. That night, after doing that, I couldn’t sleep.
—G., age ten10
A “child soldier” is generally defined (under both international law and common practice) as any person under eighteen years of age who is engaged in deadly combat or combat support as part of an armed force or group.11 That this definition is even necessary is a horrifying proof of how the nature of the warrior has changed. The presence of children has become a fact of modern combat, violating the once universal rule that they simply have no part in warfare, either as target or participant.
While this definition seems simple enough, the choice of eighteen as the onset of adulthood has sometimes been a source of contention. Obviously, childhood is a not a fixed state, simply bounded by eighteen years as its upper limit. What determines an individual’s capacities is shaped by social, political, and economic contexts, as well as by genetic heritage.
However, every culture withholds powers and responsibilities from youngsters and places them under the care and control of guardians. These are usually the parents, but also include the broader community as well, which exercises its guidance through differing laws and practices that seek to regulate the treatment of children. Once they are judged able to conduct themselves in a mature and fully rational manner, they are granted equal standing as adults. Pre-literate societies were not able to keep age records, so certain physical events (generally puberty) or social rites of passage marked the transition to adulthood. In our modern societies, adulthood is granted at the onset of a predetermined age.12
Around the world, eighteen years has become the generally accepted transition point to adulthood. Not only do the overwhelming majority of UN states not grant political rights, such as the right to vote, until a citizen is that age, but they also generally apply their laws and distribute their public services differently to those below this threshold. For example, criminal sanctions are lighter for those under the age of eighteen, including special dispensations with regard to the death penalty in the United States, while those below eighteen qualify for different social benefits, such as education and health care. Simply put, the age itself has emerged as the international norm for adulthood. As explored in the following chapters, this age point also had carried over into the military realm, generally determining who was allowed to serve as a warrior and who was ineligible to be targeted.13